This Week on Mad Men, It's All in the Wrists

I file from an undisclosed location on the Jersey Shore where the monarch butterflies should be arriving in battalion force any day now before making their southern push. Until this weekend, Mad Men pretty much ruled the smarter stratosphere of tv chatter uncontested, a Dunhill lighter amid the cheap matchboxes of the crappy summer schedule. But this week we get a raft of primetime debuts and returning hit shows, the biggest item of curiosity value being the premiere of Jay Leno’s nightly comedy show at 10 o’clock, which will either reset television’s biorhythm or prove to be a Nutty Professor experiment that went up in green smoke. Can Mad Men continue to exert its slow-drip fascination with all this other jazz jamming the airwaves?

Let us pop our head through the time-worm keyhole and see:

Ah, we begin in a classroom not unlike the one in which I learned how to duck under the desk in case of Russian attack. Such sense-memories it brings back, of chalk and rubber erasers and the Proustian aroma of Play-Doh, the mashy feel of it in the hands out of which a small Incredible Hulk could be molded. Enter Don and Betty, met by a pretty brunette teacher no doubt inspired by Miss Landers on Leave It to Beaver, but with more overt sexual agency.It’s a parent-teacher conference, just like on the first season of Nurse Jackie! Only there the bright, young, troubled daughter was drawing emo-morbid scenes in which everything seemed to be shedding ashen leaves in a vacation snapshot from the rainy void. Here, it’s a water-fountain catfight rumble with a streak of blood applied like war-paint. The teacher mentions the dark cloud of Sally’s grandfather’s death, which Don bats away when he’s asked if Sally was at the funeral.

“I don’t think children belong at graveyards”—his way of short-circuiting the grieving process, 60’s style, while his own unresolved grief shifts a little inside.

In previous episodes, an orange palette dominated, but tonight yellow is the color of mourning, a lemony-sunny shade of denial that is worn like a catechism dress.

Meanwhile, back at the Sterling Cooper set, where little work is done and every meeting ends with a rally-killing infield pop-up, the promiscuous squander of paper clips and rubber bands has prompted a parsimonious crackdown, as if this weren’t 1963, when everything was hopping and humming, but in some Dickensian bygone age when everyone was up to their asses in chimney-sweeps. Man, this nickel-and-diming economizing is a dagger driven straight to the heart of creativity! Next thing you know Conde Nast will be “querying” my expense statements, not that I have any, since I seldom leave the mezzanine of my mind. This officious British exec trying to pretend he wields authority is an annoying nose hair and SNIVELLING HYPOCRITE—imagine, an Englishman being a righteous scold about long, lubricated lunches. London professionals in almost any field put their Manhattan counterparts to shame when it comes to returning to the office at midafternoon with their hair impishly mussed and booze fumes wafting off of them in long, wavy ripples. They drink us bastards under the floorboards, if I may float a generalization.

Betty’s has arrived at the hospital to give birth to Rosemary’s Baby, the nurses in their white shoes reminiscent of nuns with no time for nonsense and a scary ability to appear out of nowhere, their placid expressions masking a will to power that would have made Nietszche take several timid steps back.

This conversation in the waiting room between Don and the Sing Sing guard is one of those too-neat slices of life that just sits there like plastic fruit.

Betty’s leafy, idyllic reverie just has to end in a Brian De Palma horror snapper, it just has to! But, no, the caterpillar in the contemplative palm of her hand suggests David Lynch in Blue Velvet, the white picket fence marking the perimeter of American Gothic.

I never enjoy birth scenes in TV shows—from I Love Lucy on, they’ve always been overwrought, bilking the audience with crisis hysteria.

The traveling shot of the hospital ceiling lights passing overhead again evokes De Palma, this time the opening sequence of Carlito’s Way when Carlito (Al Pacino) is being conveyed on a stretcher to the hereafter, the lights tripping by like road signs. I wish some of De Palma’s humor were in operation, however, instead of the ghost of Medger Evers sitting mute in the kitchen, a kitsch martyr from the Civil Rights pavilion.

Hey, Duck is back! “Strike while the iron’s hot.” “The sky’s the limit.” Duck needs a new quiver of cliches to roll around as he rattles his ice.

The black elevator operator does a double take at Pete’s racial naivete with a glance that sure packed a lot of editorializing into one telltale pause. Real lack of dialectical flow in this week’s exchanges (despite one sophomore-level invocation of Karl Marx), instead you’re almost academically aware of the dialogue flapping back and forth over the net, which reminds me: I better check on the score of the Wozniacki-Clijsters match (Wozzy down 3-2 in the second set).

Those copies of Ebony and Jet at Pete’s pitch meeting reminds me of a Fran Lebowitz joke that I can’t precisely recall, so the prudent course is to simply let that little thought go.

Pete’s dancing shoes and Peggy’s roach clip seem to have been put away for this episode and perhaps for the foreseeable future.

“Are you aware of how many handjobs I have to give?” Week after week, John Slattery’s Roger gets the killer quotables while everyone else is awarded limp asparagus.

If the vertical shadow stripes on Betty’s nightgown as she stood still in the hallway before entering the crying baby’s room were intended to conjure the prison bars of motherhood, I have to say: Mish accomplished. But I’m so aware of how aware of the makers of Mad Men are of the tiny epiphanies that they hang in picture frames in every episode that all this compounding self-consciousness has become a series of cloud layers. The Dylanesque winds about to blow in the Sixties seem dormant and abstract in the hermetic soundstage of Mad Men, where feminism and civil rights are inserted into conversations as if tapped out on a label-maker and adhesively stuck to the characters. What should have been major juicy intrigue—Duck’s attempt to persuade Pete and Peggy to defect—was handled so sketchily and with such an absence of subtlety and finesse that it had no pull of temptation, no potential poison-apple bite of betrayal. And the dream sequences were an embarrassment.

But Roger got off a good line, which is the only role he seems to have at Sterling Cooper: the Zen archer of zingers.